Screenshot of the
Tableau Dashboard. Available [here]
and at the end of this post. A dream of Bob Dylan When I was a kid, my
parents wanted to ensure that I’d do as well as I possibly could in exams and
get a place in University. To this end they hired a personal tutor to give me additional
tuition in a variety of subjects that I kinda sucked at.* That’s why they hired
JS. The routine was always the same … JS would come to my house and I’d attempt
to feign interest and proficiency in my coursework for an hour or so, a couple
of times a week. One evening I was listening to the radio when he came over and
his first words were ‘What’s that on the radio?’ … well, no, actually … he didn’t
say that at all … his language was peppered with obscenities and, when I said
it was just something from the charts, he only got more agitated. Lessons were
abandoned for the evening as I was treated to a tirade on the poor quality of
what made the charts (it was the mid 80s … he wasn’t wrong). The next wee…

In a recent blog post
on Northern Ireland’s Renewal Heat Incentive (RHI) scandal [here]
I spent quite a bit of time recording all of the changes, tweaks, and decisions
I had to make to get the data into a usable format. With any dataset it is
important to understand the transformations that went into bringing it to its
final form. If other researchers are unable to follow your process and
consistently achieve the same results from the same dataset it brings your
analysis into question. Beyond that, it brings the whole endeavour of data
science and data analysis into disrepute. If you can’t rely on the figures to
tell a consistent story, you can’t make consistent decisions, and you can’t gain
reliable insights. You certainly can’t trust the folks who are furnishing you
this flawed and unreliable nonsense. If you can’t rely on the information
you’re seeing on your dashboard, what is it other than a collection of
interesting, but meaningless, colours and shapes? While this should be a
con…